PRACTICE:

Academic Life

Teaching

Documents for the 2004 course "Calculs algébriques et fonctionnels"
may be found here.
My executable course notes on lambda-calculus are available
here as a pdf document. The executable
Ocaml sources are freely downlodable from the Constructive
Computation Theory site.

The Fall 2008 course notes for MPRI's "Linguistic Modelling using Logical and Computational Tools" is
available here as a pdf document.

Publications

My main publications are listed here.
The latest ones may be downloaded from there.

Software projects

Recent Talks

Capsule biography

In May 68 I got my pilot
license while training as an Aerospace engineer. I learnt programming
in PAF on a CAB 500 computer, in Algol 60 on a CAE 510, in Fortran on
an IBM 7094, and in LISP 1.5 on a PDP 10.
In the 70's I investigated lambda-calculus, higher-order unification and equational logic,
and I worked on the programming environment Mentor
with Gilles Kahn in the legendary
bâtiment 8 in the historical
original IRIA site of Rocquencourt.
In the 80's
I headed the Formel project that
developed the Caml functional programming
language and the Calculus of Constructions logical
framework.
In the 90's I worked on Type Theory, coordinated the European Logical Frameworks then Types
Basic Research Actions, and headed the Coq project-team
that developed the Coq proof assistant.
In 1992 I invented the
Zipper data structure.
From 1997 to 1999 I took a research break and assumed the position of
International Relations Head at Inria Headquarters.
I traveled a lot, I often wore a tie,
and I was a tough negociator.
In 2000 I came back to research in
Computational Linguistics, and developed
the Zen toolkit for
finite-state computation, the Aum transducers
applicative structure, and the Sanskrit
Heritage linguistic platform.
In 2009 I was awarded a shawl for my Sanskrit work.
In 2005-2010 I worked on effective Eilenberg machines
and the Relational Programming methodology
with Benoît Razet. Nowadays I work mostly on Sanskrit Computational Linguistics
within a joint team between Inria
and University of Hyderabad, as an experiment in
Numerical Humanities.